Martha has come to a decision. Her nerves won't take much more of this. It’s been going on for the last two days and even Alice has noticed it.
And now they are at it again.
She shakes her head impatiently and takes another look out into the yard. Guy is polishing a piece of horse tack, head down, seemingly absorbed. If you watch closely though, you see that he has in fact got his head slightly angled and every few seconds looks across the yard. Why?
Katherine is laying out some linen over a hedge so that it can dry in the sun.
And when Katherine thinks that nobody is watching her, she is also casting brief glances at Guy.
‘It’s all well and good,’ mutters Martha, ‘but when are they going to do more than merely look at each other?’
She feels frustrated; she’d sensed a thaw between the two of them earlier in the week and half expected to hear the floorboards creak in the night as Guy stealthily made his way to Katherine’s chamber. Instead they simply seem to be talking to each other again, very politely, and then doing this annoying looking thing.
To Martha it is perplexing and irritating in equal measure. If Guy wasn’t still a little too volatile to placate easily, she would grab him by the scruff of the neck and tell him to stop wasting time.
She is tempted to talk to Katherine about it but even she realises that this may be too much of a liberty on her part.
As she goes about her duties, Martha ponders on what she can do to resolve the problem, and as she does so, she grumbles to herself. Matters are made worse by Alice who keeps looking into the yard and then coming back and acting out what she sees, with huge gusts of laugher.
But it's no laughing matter to Martha, who likes all the ends in life to be tied up neatly.
What in hell's name would goad a man like Guy into action?
And then she comes up with the answer.
Later that evening she gets Guy alone and starts to talk to him about Katherine. Her tone is conversational, light-hearted as she tells him that Sir Richard has invited Katherine to visit his Estate and to meet his mother. She says that Katherine feels that this means that Sir Richard may be close to asking her to marry him.
Guy listens in silence, his face dark and stormy. Almost between clenched teeth he asks, ‘And what do you think Katherine’s answer will be?’
Martha is pleased with his initial reaction; it is just what she hoped for: naked, raw jealousy.
Martha decides to fan the flames higher. She tells him that really Katherine would be a fool to refuse Sir Richard, what with his wealth and standing in the county. And he’s such a gentleman, so intelligent and kind and he was a good husband to his first wife ... heartbroken he was when she died in childbirth.
Good looking too in a solid kind of way … plenty of ladies in Cornwall would weep when he was wedded again.
‘Oh yes,’ says Martha, ‘I think that unless she has a better offer before then, Katherine will definitely say ‘yes’.’
Guy has his head down by this point and when Martha has stopped talking; he merely nods and says, ‘Yes, he seems a good man.’ Then he rises from his chair and leaves the room.
Martha feels a spasm of unease. This was not the reaction she expected. She thought he would be more aggressive; tell her all the reasons why Sir Richard was unsuitable. In her head this scene had finished with Guy carrying Katherine off to bed.
This docile acceptance of the situation is disturbing. She hopes she’s done the right thing.
She hasn’t. She’s done the very worst thing possible. Guy knows everything that Martha has said about Sir Richard is true and Katherine deserves to be a fine lady in a fine house again. What can Guy offer her? Nothing. No fortune, no land, no prospects.
A scarred body and a filthy stump. All she can look forward to is caring for him all her life and constantly looking over her shoulder for fear that somebody will come to kill him.
He does not stop to think that he does have money; he does have land, the land he is standing on, bought with the money he gave her. He does not stop to consider that what he has heard are only Martha’s thoughts, not Katherine’s. He sees and hears only what confirms his own miserable opinion of his own worth.
Even if she does have real feelings for him, the right thing for him to do is to leave, so that she is free to build a new life, the life she deserves.
So that night whilst they all asleep he takes Vasey and ties him in the barn and then, with much struggling, saddles his horse and rides away. All he takes with him is some money Martha keeps in a pot in the kitchen to pay the fish merchant. It’s not much but it’s sufficient to buy him a bed for a couple of nights and a bottle of something to take the edge off his misery.
As he rides away he can hear Vasey starting to whimper and howl and it seems to echo the ache in his own heart. He is close to breaking down, but it is better this way. In time she will forget him and have the life she should have: easy days with a loving husband, and the children for whom he has always sensed that she yearns.
That last thought makes him wince with pain … Katherine big with another man’s child, but he keeps on riding.
Wasn’t this what she said love was about all those months ago back in Nottingham? In the end the other person’s happiness was more important than your own?
